Joining us for the next 3 days were our son and daughter in-law, her parents who we like very much, their son and his partner and his partner's sister.
We packed everything tightly into the car with little room left and drove to the 'in-laws' home in St Albans for some very warm welcomes from them, an obligatory cup of tea and then a lot more packing into their car before starting our 3-4 hr road trip north.
We would be spending Christmas together in a rented home in Lancashire and bordering Yorkshire as shown on the map below.
Our family name has a long association with Lancashire going back at least to1066 with a concentration of people with our surname still living in Lancashire, including the host of the house we had rented who knows some, which also happened to have a pet wallaby in its backyard!
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| Our accomodation (brown section) in Lancashire |
We really enjoyed a very traditional Christmas lunch on a cold wintery drizzly day, very different to our summer weather back home... expertly cooked turkey, ham, roast veggies, pudding, a range of English beers and ciders, nice wines and great company!
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| A great Christmas spread with really good company! |
Over the next few days we learned much about the British way of life, especially after eating too much on Christmas Day... they like to go walking in the rain.
Now keep in mind it was winter in the UK and that means it was cold and wet, in fact we also got to learn how good the weather forecasts are in the UK.
First thing in the morning our hosts check the local weather forecast and plan when we would head out to explore the surrounding sights and scenery. It amazed us that our hosts trusted the forecast when it predicted it would rain say at 1pm so we needed to leave early. Even more amazing... it did rain at whatever the predicted time was!
The cloudy, cold and at times dampish weather did not hold us back and it actually added to the look and feel of the many things we visited in this part of the UK, for example.
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| Lake Windermere in the Lakes District |
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| Hardy highland cow |
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| Magnificent limestone Malham Cove |
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| Driving through Yorkshire |
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| Ribblehead Viaduct in southern Yorkshire with some locals |
The memories from a delightful Christmas were fresh in our minds as we negotiated the busy freeways back to London and a little more sightseeing this time around Greenwich, famous for 'Greenwich Mean Time' and the starting point for the world's time.
First port of call, bad pun I know, was the Cutty Sark, a refurbished British Clipper ship built in 1869 and one of the fastest sailing ships of the time to transport tea from the China. The Cutty Sark was one of the last of this type of ship to be built and visited Australia on many occasions.
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| Cutty Sark under sail (Photo - Allan C. Green) |
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| Sleek copper plated hull of the Cutty Sark |
The other reason for being in Greenwich was to look at 3 very famous clocks made by a John Harrison, a self taught clock maker, who solved one of the greatest issues of the time in the 1770's... how to calculate Longitude.
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| Captain Cook took a replica of this (H4) Harrison clock to test its ability to calculate Longitude |
Our time in the UK was almost over for 2012, including celebrating New Year's Eve but our travels weren't yet over in the northern hemisphere, but that will all have to wait for the 2013 posts.
Go well!
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